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Summary
Summary
"A multilayered, inspiring portrait of RFK . . . the] most in-depth look at an extraordinary figure whose transformational story shaped America."--Joe Scarborough, The Washington Post
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - Soon to be a Hulu original series starring Chris Pine. Larry Tye appears on CNN's American Dynasties: The Kennedys .
"We are in Larry Tye's debt for bringing back to life the young presidential candidate who . . . almost half a century ago, instilled hope for the future in angry, fearful Americans."--David Nasaw, The New York Times Book Review
Bare-knuckle operative, cynical White House insider, romantic visionary--Robert F. Kennedy was all of these things at one time or another, and each of these aspects of his personality emerges in the pages of this powerful and perceptive biography.
History remembers RFK as a racial healer, a tribune for the poor, and the last progressive knight of a bygone era of American politics. But Kennedy's enshrinement in the liberal pantheon was actually the final stage of a journey that began with his service as counsel to the red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy. In Bobby Kennedy, Larry Tye peels away layers of myth and misconception to capture the full arc of his subject's life. Tye draws on unpublished memoirs, unreleased government files, and fifty-eight boxes of papers that had been under lock and key for forty years. He conducted hundreds of interviews with RFK intimates, many of whom have never spoken publicly, including Bobby's widow, Ethel, and his sister, Jean. Tye's determination to sift through the tangle of often contradictory opinions means that Bobby Kennedy will stand as the definitive biography about the most complex and controversial member of the Kennedy family.
Praise for Bobby Kennedy
"A compelling story of how idealism can be cultivated and liberalism learned . . . Tye does an exemplary job of capturing not just the chronology of Bobby's life, but also the sense of him as a person." -- Los Angeles Review of Books
"Captures RFK's rise and fall with straightforward prose bolstered by impressive research." -- USA Today
" Tye] has a keen gift for narrative storytelling and an ability to depict his subject with almost novelistic emotional detail." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Nuanced and thorough . . . RFK's] vision echoes through the decades." -- The Economist
Author Notes
Larry Tye is a medical writer at The Boston Globe where he has won numerous awards for his work. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is the author of The Father of Spin, a biography of public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays. His latest biography is called Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend.
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Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
It is difficult to envision anyone getting Robert F. Kennedy more right than biographer Tye (Satchel) does in this superb book. Tye beautifully captures Kennedy's contradictions, his emergence from under the hard-to-like father to whom he remained forever loyal, and his growth into a public figure killed by an assassin's bullet. It's also hard to imagine another biographer framing the subject any differently: Tye depicts Kennedy's transformation from a callow, ruthless, hypocritical, "godawful disagreeable" man to his era's "most nostalgia-wrapped figure" of "transcendent good," someone who shifted as his nation changed. Tye equitably concedes that Kennedy's detractors have much reason to be tough on the man, and his clear depiction of Kennedy's many blemishes is just one of the book's many fine qualities. Another is its wonderful readability. In the end, Tye's subject stands forth as an admirable man. Yes, he often failed to level with people, hid his feelings, and pursued vendettas (notably against Lyndon Johnson). But as Tye shows, R.F.K. at the end of his life warranted the faith people put in him and came close to being the person his admirers thought him to be. Agent: Jill Kneerim, Kneerim & Williams. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A former journalist at the Boston Globe returns with a comprehensive, thesis-driven account of the political career of Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-1968).Tye (Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero, 2013, etc.) develops the argument that RFK was an evolving human being and politician, a tireless attorney general and senator on whom nothing was lost. The author begins with his association with one McCarthy (Joseph) and ends, more or less, with another (Eugene, whom RFK battled in the 1968 presidential primaries). Relying on countless interviews, including the contributions of RFK's widow, Tye weaves a compelling story of Bobby's changes: his growth from the "ruthless" image his political enemies attached to him to the committed humanitarian, the friend of African-Americans, the enemy of poverty, and the outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. We see his devoted support of John F. Kennedy's various campaigns, his vigorous performance as attorney general, his devastation after JFK's assassination, his rancorous relationship with Lyndon Johnson. But mostly it's his changes that interest the author. Not the student or scholar that JFK had been, RFK began to readafter the JFK assassination, he read Aeschylus and listened while he shaved to recordings of Shakespeare playsand to inform himself deeply about the issues. Not a witty, graceful politician like his older brother, RFK worked hard to develop an effective style. Although Tye is a patent admirer, he wonders about RFK's relationship with Marilyn Monroe, and he is also unsure about a possible affair with widow Jackie Kennedy. The author chides RFK for such things as slanting his account of the Bay of Pigs, his perhaps excessive pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa, and his early hawkishness on Vietnam. But the contrary image is clear: a good, if not great man; an unspeakable loss. Richly researched prose that sometimes soars too close to the sun of admiration. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The trouble with calling someone iconic is that the truth is often obscured under layers of mythology. Nowhere, perhaps, is that more pertinent than in the legends surrounding Robert F. Kennedy. Those of a certain age remember him as a Don Quixote-like figure tilting at the windmills of poverty, racism, and a prolonged war in Vietnam. Some may be aware that he was the right-hand man for Senator Joseph McCarthy, an arch conservative dedicated to rooting out Communist subversives. How and why did Kennedy morph from one to the other? Was the seasoned politician who ran for president in 1968 that far removed from the eager staff aide associated with such a controversial crusader? Through extensive conversations with Bobby's widow, Ethel, and far-reaching interviews with key aides, colleagues, close friends, and ideological adversaries, Tye (Superman, 2012) unflinchingly illustrates the evolution of a statesman who captured the imagination of a generation and whose assassination galvanized a nation reeling from the losses of Martin Luther King Jr. and, of course, Kennedy's beloved older brother. Even-handed and probing, Tye's perceptive analysis of RFK's career and its impact avoids the hagiographic tone frequently associated with Kennedy biographies to provide a complete portrait of a complex man whose contributions to history were essential and whose potential will remain forever unknowable.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HE WAS MURDERED six months shy of his 43 rd birthday. He had served as attorney general for fewer than four years and as senator from the state of New York for three and a half. His campaign for the presidency lasted only two and a half months. Robert Francis Kennedy's written résumé is rather thin, but that is only to be expected of one who died so young. He deserves our attention not because of what he did, but because of who he was, what he represented and what we hope he might have accomplished had he lived. There have been more bad books written about Robert Kennedy and his family than almost any other public figures. The Kennedys, as a group and as individuals, have been all too easy to caricature. They were too present, too packaged, much too pretty and, during their lives and after their deaths, subject to more than their share of salacious rumors, innuendo and silly, often vicious gossip. Hundreds of books have been assembled by cherry-picking anecdotes, thirdhand reminiscences and unsourced accusations. Few have made adequate use of the copious historical records that are available to researchers, though, like all archives, the Kennedy papers are incomplete, imperfect and sanitized. Larry Tye has done his homework. He has read the books and articles, interviewed hundreds of family members, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, and made use of newly released materials in the Kennedy Library and elsewhere to produce a nuanced, balanced, affectionate and mostly favorable portrait. The story he tells in "Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon" is familiar, but the vast array of materials he has consulted and the interviews he has conducted are enough to give it a new vitality. Biographers and historians have been tempted to make sense of the twists and turns in Robert Kennedy's life by dividing it in two. There was the ruthless, rabid, bad Bobby who worked for Joe McCarthy, then borrowed his tactics to go after Jimmy Hoffa and get his brother elected president. Good Bobby was born from the conversion experience that followed a soul-searching internal retreat he underwent after the assassination of his brother. Good Bobby was as committed to social justice, improving the lot of the poor, ending racism and bringing peace to the world as bad Bobby was to humiliating witnesses who dared to exercise their Fifth Amendment rights. Tye, the author of a biography of Satchel Paige among other books, wisely avoids the two-Bobby stratagem. He presents us instead with a kind of bildungsrom an of a young, privileged man who is forced to learn on the job and makes mistakes, of a rich man's son who is thrown into positions he is ill qualified for. His father got him his first jobs, then insisted that his brother appoint him attorney general, though he had never tried a case in court, or even practiced law, and had done only passably well in law school. Three months into his term, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco convinced the president that his military and intelligence advisers were incompetent and untrustworthy, John Kennedy added new tasks to his brother's portfolio, for which he was equally unprepared. The 35-year-old attorney general became not only his brother's chief domestic and foreign policy adviser, but also his shadow C.I.A. director, secretary of state and director of a clandestine war against Cuba, Operation Mongoose. As the organizing force behind Operation Mongoose, Robert Kennedy was, Tye argues, a chief instigator of the Cuban missile crisis he would later claim to have defused. While Congress and the American public were kept in the dark about the Kennedys' covert war against Cuba, together with the assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, Operation Mongoose was no secret in either Havana or Moscow. "Mongoose - coming on the heels of the Bay of Pigs and other muscle flexing by the Americans - helped convince Khrushchev he was doing the right thing by installing missiles to defend the island against U.S. aggression." In "Thirteen Days," his book on the missile crisis, Robert Kennedy would take major credit for the peaceful and, for the Kennedy brothers, triumphant settlement. What he left out of his account was his hawkish stance when the missiles were first discovered on Cuban soil and the fact that the deal he helped negotiate gave Khrushchev precisely what he had wanted from the beginning: a no-invasion pledge and an agreement (kept secret) to remove American missiles from Turkey in return for the Soviets removing theirs from Cuba. In his time as de facto deputy president, young Kennedy was, according to Tÿe, outmaneuvered not only by Khrushchev but, during the civil rights campaign, by the governors Ross Barnett in Mississippi and John Patterson and George Wallace in Alabama. Fortunately, he learned from his mistakes and matured into the roles he had been assigned. He came to understand, belatedly perhaps, that his and his brother's initial reluctance to come to the aid of Southern civil rights activists had been counterproductive and that the racial divide was such that only strong, concerted federal action, the kind the Kennedys had so studiously hoped to avoid, was required. His learning curve was steep. By age 38, when he was elected to the United States Senate, he had not only become the consummate Washington insider, but had also traveled to places few Beltway politicians had been. Everywhere he visited - Poland, South Africa, Indonesia, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, the Mississippi Delta, Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, the migrant labor camps of California - he made sure to get away from his handlers and talk to the children, the workers, the poor, the young, the disinherited and angry. It was as a candidate for the presidency in 1968 that he came into his own. He had procrastinated too long and entered the campaign too late, but once in it, he made clear why he was running for president: to end the war in Vietnam, to fight racial divisions in the United States, to wage a true war on poverty. He found an eloquence, a grace, a self-confidence that had eluded him. His final campaign ended with a primary win in California, then the gunshots that took his fife. We will never know whether he would have amassed more delegate votes than Eugene McCarthy or Hubert Humphrey or more electoral votes than Richard Nixon. But his words, and the promise he held out of a nation at peace, committed to racial justice and an end to poverty, are worth remembering 48 years later. "What we need in the United States," he had shouted from the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis on April 4, after announcing to the crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed, "is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness but is love, and wisdom and compassion toward one another and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black." We are in Larry Tye's debt for bringing back to life the young presidential candidate who spoke these words and, for a brief moment, almost half a century ago, instilled hope for the future in angry, fearful Americans. Historians often divide Kennedy's life in two: the good Bobby and the bad Bobby. DAVID NASAW, the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of "The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy."
Choice Review
Those who loved Robert F. Kennedy as well as those who hated him will both find much to enjoy in Tye's biography of Kennedy's life and times. Journalist Tye removes some of the rough edges of a man often presented as ruthless and obsessive in his early political career, and offers a balanced account of a man who grew through the tumult of his era. Kennedy served as a lawyer to Joseph McCarthy's committee; worked to ensure the election of his older brother, John, to the presidency; as attorney general obsessed about Jimmy Hoffa's corruption; served as New York Senator; and, finally, ran for president himself in 1968 as a peace candidate and rival to Lyndon B. Johnson. For many, tears may flow over the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy (who had won the California primary in June) as Tye describes these events. Those who do weep may wonder how different the nation would have been had these men lived longer. A dated but helpful companion is David Halberstam's The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (CH, Jul'69). Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Paul D. Travis, Texas Woman's University
Library Journal Review
Tye's (Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend) research is thorough and his re-creation of the pivotal changes in Robert F. Kennedy's life offer an insightful look into the ways Kennedy (1925-68) became involved in the civil rights movement and liberal causes. The book emerges as a powerful reminder of the ways in which the country has changed since Kennedy's death. Marc Cashman does a fine job of narrating this biography. He achieves both lighthearted and somber tones with equal aplomb. VERDICT Highly recommended for lovers of history and social justice. ["While shedding new light on Kennedy's relationships with Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr., Tye ultimately reveals Kennedy as a work in progress who, by the end of his life, had become a beloved advocate for minorities and the poor": LJ 6/15/16 starred review of the Random hc.]-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.